WasteNot

In Doom, as in many games, if you pick up ammo/health/armor when you're close to the limit, any extra is quietly lost. But where do those extra bullets go? They seem to vanish into thin air.

Until today.

Because now you can play with WasteNot, which will convert those lost items into something practical: shame. WasteNot adds a tracker to your HUD that tells you exactly how much free stuff you've discarded into the void by not being sufficiently vigilant about all the junk you're juggling while trying to shoot demons from Hell.

Try it today!

WasteNot should work with Doom I, Doom II, Final Doom, and FreeDoom. (Tragically, it does not seem to work with Chex Quest, but please let me know if that's important to you and I'll look into it.) If you don't have any of the Doom games, you can either buy them from Bethesda (who didn't make them?), find them on archive.org, or probably pirate them somewhere.

WasteNot will also work with any vanilla or Boom-compatible maps and mods for those games. ZDoom maps and mods may work, so long as they don't replace any of the stock items, add new variants of stock items, or rely on specials on the stock items.

It also works in multiplayer, so I hope at least one person tries it co-op! Finally, you can prove once and for all that that other asshole has been taking all the ammo.

Known bugs:

The console spews some warnings on startup. They're harmless. For now?

WasteNot doesn't know about IDFA or items given via the console (or via scripts in other mods). In particular, it does some hokey things to track whether you're wearing green or blue armor, and it may lose track if you're given a different color through other means.

It's possible that the tracking will go awry if multiple things happen simultaneously, such as stepping onto two items in the same frame. I saw this happen when firing with max ammo while standing on top of an ammo pickup, and I tried to fix it, and then it stopped happening at all, so, ???

Picking up a powerup (e.g. radiation suit) when you already have one isn't tracked as a waste of the powerup, but it totally should be. Trouble is that that would take a ton of space on the screen, and only really matter for slaughtermaps; regular maps rarely have a bunch of the same powerup.

It would be very cool if this could also track wasted damage you inflict, but that would be an incredible pain in the ass.

Unknown bugs:

Probably a lot, this is a bit hacky, but it's worked well enough so far and I don't want to take it too seriously

Install instructions

WasteNot requires GZDoom. Probably anything as old as 2.3.0 will work, but recent releases are always a good idea. Just drag wastenot.pk3 onto GZDoom, or pass it on the command line with -file wastenot.pk3, or go totally wild and autoload it.

DO NOT unzip wastenot.pk3! I mean, you can if you want to, but there's no reason to.